High-resolution wind-atlas extractor

Problem

Pulling high-resolution wind-atlas maps for a project area and preparing them for GIS work took about half a day by hand, so the coarser 3 km map was the easy default.

What I did

I built a tool that takes a site outline or bounding box and a hub height, extracts the 50 m maps for that area, writes them in the formats the GIS workflow expects, and verifies its output instead of trusting it.

Result

Half a day of GIS work became about a minute. Comparing the two resolutions over one project area showed why it matters: both maps give nearly the same area-average wind speed, but the coarse one flattens the ridges where turbines go. More than twice as many candidate sites cleared 6 m/s on the 50 m map as on the 3 km map.

Tools

Python · New European Wind Atlas · GDAL · QGIS